A brief aside in order to defend the virtues and vices of my home country…
First of all: there is no such thing as the Flemish countryside
. Or rather, what one could call ‘the Flemish countryside’ is carefully divided into little patches, and cunningly hidden between the houses.
In the 50’s and 60’s there was no real legislation for structuring residential areas, rural areas, etc… other than the simple rule that allowed houses to be built, wherever there was a street, be it in a suburb or in the middle of the countryside. Result: every main road through the countryside has two neat rows of houses on both sides and behind it, carefully hidden: untouched countryside. There’s a word for it in Dutch: ‘lintbebouwing’, which one could translate as ‘ribbon building’. We’re quite famous for it (or should I say ‘infamous’).
This is a good example, but unfortunately this is Holland!
Flanders is more like this:
(The white blurb on the horizon is Brussels.)I love the full-built and checkered nature of Flanders. Always little corners, little bits, little groups of trees, hedges, dirt roads, huts, houses… It makes me feel cosy and protected. Driving through the north of France (the Champagne-Ardennes district) on the way home from a trip to the south of France, I was astounded by the total emptiness of the countryside. How eerie that is. Miles and miles of fields, with sometimes a lone industrial complex at the horizon, and every now and then a village. I wondered how you could live in a village like that, so totally cut off from everything.
In Flanders you could never be alone. Whatever way you set out, you will never be lost in the middle of nowhere. You’ll always be somewhere. (And there will probably be a café there as well. I must say, I do like Holland because of its strict separation of ‘nature’ and ‘village’ or ‘city’, the countryside is very broad and beautiful! But oh, how you can cycle miles and miles through it, from church tower to church tower, in search of a café to ease your thirst, and find nothing…)
Then, you mention the concrete streets. I didn’t know we still had a lot of those, but it brought back some childhood memories. I remember my very first journey to a foreign country, with my parents and my brother on the bus, listening to a conversation some man had with the bus driver. He celebrated the virtues of concrete roads, so many years they’ve been lying there, and still not one driving mark. I felt secretly proud of them. I also remember the continuous little bumps you felt, going over the ridges, when driving home by night after visiting some friends, my parents talking in the front of the car, going over every detail of the evening, me in the back only half awake, the big, white moon above us…
I take it you have travelled on the provincial roads, DonB… There’s something strange about provincial roads in Flanders. There so lonely, so empty, so grey, somber, so unhabitable and still people live, walk, buy on them. I can’t really describe it. I should take some pictures of lonely provincial roads now that the weather is grey and autumnal to give you an idea. But if these are the roads you’ve travelled on, DonB, I can understand your dismay…
I should say, if you’d have liked to see something of what’s left of the Flemish countryside, you’d better had taken the motorways… They sometimes cross the more uninhabited bits… The drive from Brussels to Ostend isn’t too bad, especially more up north, in the flat country.
But to make up for your awful journey, I've you made
a little guide to the secluded corners of the Flemish countryside. (I post this as a separate thread because so many photos take a lot of time to load and I do not want to slow down this thread for everyone.)
Edited to make the link work.
